Myth Busting: OpenStack, Cloud, and Dell EMC

created by jimgraves on Oct 14, 2016 2:28 PM, last modified by jimgraves on Dec 22, 2016 9:44 AM

Version 2

As the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona approaches, it’s time to put a stake in the lingering perception that OpenStack is a niche technology for a small group of early adopters. Today, 55% of enterprises with 1,000 or more employees are using, experimenting, or planning to use OpenStack for their private clouds. For some large enterprises (Walmart and Verizon are examples), OpenStack plays a central role in their IT infrastructure. On the other hand, the perception that VMware is the private cloud leader by far, remains true. Both VSphere/vCenter and VMware vCloud Suite have higher enterprise adoption for private clouds than either Microsoft System Center or OpenStack. Here are the numbers:

Another perception is that the hyper-visor for OpenStack is always KVM. KVM is used for 90+ % of OpenStack deployments. But there are real options, for example vSphere/ESXi is used for 8% of OpenStack deployments and Hyper-V is used for 4% of OpenStack deployments, typically in Microsoft environments. [Data source: OpenStack Foundation 2016 User Survey Report]

OpenStack is being used for a long list of IT and business functions with software dev/test/QA, infrastructure services (public and private clouds), and web/e-commerce services at the top of the list. These top 3 are followed by network, storage, and big data analytics in this data from the OpenStack User Group survey:

OpenStack is playing a significant role in transforming data centers for digital and cloud native applications. The fight for market share in environments for cloud native apps is hotly contested. Who is in the fight? Nearly every large tech company and plenty of start-ups have developed cloud native offerings, including, for example (on-premises, public cloud, or both): AWS, MS Azure, Google, SAP, HP, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, Pivotal, VMware, Dell EMC, Pivotal, Mirantis, RedHat, Canonical, and SUSE. While AWS, MS Azure, and Google were fast out of the box with cloud native offerings, many people perceive that the Dell Technologies companies were late to the gate. In fact, Dell Technologies companies have been actively contributing to and participating in the OpenStack and cloud native ecosystem for a very long time:

EMC has developed and contributed software for the last seven major OpenStack releases, to integrate Dell EMC storage products with OpenStack, including: VMAX, VNX, Isilon, ViPR, ECS, XtremeIO, CoprHD (open source), and ScaleIO

When you add it all up, Dell Technologies offers an unmatched choice of offerings for enterprises to buy or build cloud native environments. These offerings are accompanied by deep expertise in OpenStack and services to help customers transform IT for the cloud native era. In fact, Dell EMC is number 1 in cloud infrastructure (according to IDC). Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the leading cloud native platform-as-a-service technology is being used by millions of developers around the globe and, over the past decade, Pivotal Labs has helped more start-ups and leading global companies to adopt cloud native capabilities than anyone.

OpenStack and cloud native technologies are well established and fast growing elements of enterprise IT. While it may be a surprise to some, the OpenStack and cloud native expertise, products, and services inside Dell Technologies provide many great choices for enterprises to modernize, automate, and transform their data centers.